After featuring graffiti with USA’94, here’s a book about USA’94, published about a week ago. It’s size A4 and lets you replay the football world cup from 1994. It looks very complicated to read. I’m not sure if I can make it despite watching the championship and knowing roughly what happened. It has 500 episodes and about half-a-book of rules about what to do with these 500 episodes.
I find it cool that people can come up with such ideas, publish them, and potentially even find someone to read them.
I like visiting the book fairs in Sofia. We usually have two per year, one in December, and one in May. I would often go 3-4 times, slowly navigating through the landscape, buying 1-2 books at a time.
I went there with the goal to buy the new book by Nicci French and maybe return for another round over the next 3-4 days. Came back to the office with 8. That’s a bit too many. This means I’m not returning to the fair as I exceeded the reasonable maximum of new books for the month 🙂 Anything else will have to wait.
Highlights:
The Dungeon Crawler Carl – I have to admit I made a purchase decision based on the fact that this book has a hole in the cover. It also has a very high score on Goodreads but that wouldn’t have been enough to buy it.
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie – you can say by the beautiful print that Joe Abercrombie has a new publisher for Bulgaria. The last one only did paperbacks.
The Last Days of Kira Mullan – Maud O’Conner’s part 1 was quite interesting I hope this book lives up to the expectations. That would likely be the next book I’ll start (currently reading two other). I like Nicci French.
Just completed this thing, it was intense. 9/10 on the Matthew Reilly’s Contest scale. It was so intense that I’m not sure if I will dare to read the continuation. It also makes sense. Books like that tend to ignore the laws of physics, this is connected with reality.
Clear 5*/5 and a strong contestant for best thriller on my blog this year. Very impressive.
A solid story about a stalker who is unusually creepy and perhaps more dangerous than the million others like him. A beautiful journalist receives threats and unwanted advances, like flowers and chocolates, combined with threats. The detective trio Jake, Nicole, and Pancake are trying to help because they see the danger past the weird acts of attention. However, they have trouble figuring out who he is. This type of people normally physically chase their victims, while in our case, the perpetrator hides in the shadows.
I guessed who the villain was maybe five pages before the official reveal, so I’m not sure whether to feel proud of myself or not.
The book has a certain neon glow and the intentional smell of cheap things, like an exploitation movies from the past. It doesn’t feel too heavy, despite the constant threat of the stalker. I’d say it’s fine and an acceptable read. Not award-winning rocket science but not annoying either. Jake, Nicole, and Pancake are simple and well-intended characters.
I’m not sure why only parts 1, 2, and 5 of the series have been translated into Bulgarian while 3 and 4 were skipped. A strange choice by the publisher. It’s even stranger to translate a book that had the modest 199 ratings and 37 reviews on Goodreads, mine included. Won’t be the least popular book I read this year but it will be very close to the bottom.
The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin – the duology is over, and so are all the books by Nora Jemisin, translated in Bulgarian. I liked it, although the memories about it are already fading.
For We Are Many by Dennis E. Taylor – the self-replicating Bobs have reached a hostile alien form, they named “Others”. The Others show no mercy.
Charity 1 by Wolfgang Hohlbein – speaking of mercy, the aliens in Charity show no mercy either. The destruction of humanity is almost complete, yet there’s Charity. Where does that lead us I couldn’t find because I stopped after book 3.
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